A little later, when Moushumi and I set out with Yakub, I noticed girls of Mira’s, Tulti’s and Paakhi’s ages walking by the road with bundles of sticks on their heads. Then, while we waited near their school gate for Tulti and Paakhi to appear, I got out of the car and watched the dozens of girls in their blue-and-white uniforms trooping towards the waiting buses, Tempos, cycle rickshaws and family cars. Several of the younger ones were squeezing in one final game of something or other before heading to their pick-ups; Moushumi was certain our girls too were probably playing in the assembly hall. In fact, they were among the last to appear, a couple of minutes after I’d returned from the dust of the main gate to the car.
‘Mira would have loved to be here,’ I’d just told Moushumi, who had been on the phone. ‘It’s strange how everything makes me miss her today. She would have had so much fun, from being with her two didis in the morning, then meeting Aaliya and playing big sister to her, to coming along for this pick-up. She would have definitely asked if she could visit her didis’ school.’
‘I’m sure we can arrange it. The teachers would probably like the girls to meet a young visitor from New Zealand.’
What I had said about missing Mira was true. Perhaps it was just straightforwardly that, or else the lingering awareness as well of her absence from Skype that morning, and the likely sadness and upset behind it. But every little girl I had seen today, including the ones carrying firewood on their heads, had brought her back to me. Right now, if bedtime had gone smoothly, she should be fast asleep. It was 10.10 in Wellington. And here I was, a long car ride back to Ranchi, then a train journey to Calcutta, a flight to Bangkok, a thirteen-hour (WTF!) wait followed by an almost equally long flight to Auckland, another wait and another one-hour flight before I could hope to see her face as I came out of the airbridge at Wellington airport.
How the fuck had I allowed myself to come somewhere so absurdly far from her? What if one of us urgently needed to see the other? What if there was an actual emergency?
‘Are you sure you don’t want to do any marketing today, for Lena or for Mira? Yakub is with us all day.’ Moushumi used a common substitute term for ‘shopping’.
I said maybe the day after tomorrow for my two, but that she’d luckily reminded me that I needed to take Paakhi today to her favourite shops. I then made myself breathe slowly and remember these wonderful girls I had come to meet. I was going to have three more days in their company, Paakhi and Tulti. The time here would fly.
‘And it occurred to me because of your earlier question about sightseeing that I might do a morning walk tomorrow around the lakes, see if they are still as lovely as I remember, and maybe we can pick up the girls in the afternoon, get a snack somewhere and all go to Canary Hill before sunset. I haven’t been there in twenty years. I actually want to see how long that walk takes to the top. I vividly remember as a kid how endless it felt, like you were scaling some epic mountain, which gives you some idea of what Calcutta people consider a mountain.’
I suddenly realise that’s all I need to share about that first afternoon, even though I did take Paakhi and of course Tulti present-shopping later, and also bought nice woollens for both Jhappi and his dad. Before all that, we visited Moushumi’s mother for afternoon tea, who lived in a brand-new colony out near what to me was the ‘brand-new’ university (established in ’92, so all that indicates is my ignorance and absence), off the Ranchi–Patna road.
Or perhaps I mean that I need to alter the angle of my narrative, in order to bring out what was really taking place around me. Let’s see if I can get this across.
To be sure, nothing dramatic or noteworthy happened that day, at least not until Jhappi came over that evening. Moushumi’s mother was a very pleasant lady in remarkable-seeming health who seemed happy to have me over at a half-hour’s notice: it was her that Moushumi had been calling from the car outside the school. I learnt that she too was a green-fingers extraordinaire, and visited her two verandahs crammed with plants.
But sitting in her first-floor flat, gazing into a large, murky fish-tank and with samosas, jalebis and soan papdi on a plate in front of me, and the girls dividing up sweets and crisps among themselves, I had another perspective into these first twenty-one hours in Hazaribagh. I had appeared with minimal warning to give my brother hardly any time in which to prepare to manipulate me, or plot with anyone in my sister’s family against me, and yet here, on his patch, I had experienced what felt like the most transparent glimpse I’d had into his life ever since we reconnected in July.
And what it felt like I’d seen was — to put it across as an image, which is also the least likely image I would have expected to be using just a day earlier — open lives, open doors. Paakhi was picked up last night and brought to what seemed like her second home at a moment’s notice: here she was now, the daughter of Moushumi’s long-absent sister-in-law, but as comfortable around Moushumi’s mother as Tulti was. Just two granddaughters lording it over their grandma’s house, exactly as Mira did at Rosemary’s.
Then there was Aaliya going back and forth, and Moushumi’s warm, engaged relationships with both Yakub and Saraswati, who’d gone all-out to make us three different dishes along with pulao and parathas for lunch. And Jhappi was coming over in the evening, and meanwhile we were being welcomed by Moushumi’s mother, on pretty much the first extended day that Moushumi and I had ever spent together.
In a word, the utter absence of any drama, any swishing sounds or disappearing footsteps behind me before I could turn, or locked doors or drawn curtains I was repeatedly led away from, was the incredible breaking story of my visit. It was as though I’d shown up without warning precisely to catch them out, and Dada’s, and Moushumi’s, response had been — come in, welcome, take a stroll around our lives, go anywhere you like; in fact, let’s throw everything open.
And while you’re looking around, make sure to notice the incredible team we are. A family encompassing three families, with no one forgotten or ignored.
While you were building that life of yours in foreign parts, Abhi, and while our own parents kind of forgot that we existed, this is what we forged here in sleepy Hazaribagh. And even the loss of a key member, or the struggles and difficulties of others, has not thrown us off track.
It was premature, but what I longed for Lena to see, what I couldn’t fully believe myself even as I wanted to shout the news to her and to Ma — both to inspire them and (truthfully) in the spirit of telling them so — was that this branch of our family, with the unlikeliest of apparent captains in Dada and no lasting precedent of teamwork whatsoever, was kind of a Hazaribagh chapter of The Three Musketeers.
Jhappi brought drama with him that evening, it was true, but only of the good kind, because he was, from first introduction itself, a humongously gifted comedian. Even at the time I was certain he was much more than this; there might have been a lot of thought behind him choosing to put on quite the show he did, or else it was instinct that kicked in, I don’t know, but the performance itself couldn’t have been faked. That had to be a large part of who he always was.
Perhaps it was Dada who’d asked him to turn on this side of himself tonight, to disarm me. So what, I decided after a brief consideration. No grown-up had made me laugh as hard in years. Although I did note that no one had properly told me that Jhappi had such an extraordinary gift. It was unleashed upon me as pure surprise, probably with everyone else enjoying my reaction.
Afterwards I tried thinking back to a few hours earlier, to recall what I’d expected of this meeting. I had been keen but also apprehensive, probably imagining a garden-variety nephew, but one who would be meeting the forever-absent brother of a long-missing Ma. If ever a situation demanded an incredible performance to tide over with grace and humour, this was it.
But Jhappi’s brilliance went well beyond politeness. This seemed vocational for him, something deeper than responding to the exigencies of this evening. There is an artist I know in Calcutta who always has a fu
nd of memorised jokes that he throws in one after another without any relevance or continuity, almost in place of actual conversation. Jhappi was nothing like that guy.
For starters, he was about five foot four (although at seventeen, he might well have some growing left to do), and almost square-bodied from being stout but also overweight, and his own appearance was the single most recurrent feature of his humour. Which made me recall what a cruel place school can be, and how kids find different ways to cope.
‘Come on, Abhay Mama, admit it. When I walked in, didn’t you think, hey, who stole Bappi Lahiri’s jewellery?’
Shortly after, Saraswati brought in a full tray of snacks, and this sparked off a perfect re-enactment of a visit to a South Indian temple in Calcutta on a festival day, where Jhappi had sat down with a friend for the communal feast afterwards. The people around, rice lovers all, had consumed mind-boggling quantities of it, and because every question from the food-servers had been in Tamil, a hapless Jhappi too had been given the same portions each time. ‘There was something magic about that prasadam, Abhay Mama, and because of this fucking upbringing that insists you have to finish everything on your plate, that day my stomach walls lost their spring forever. You ask anybody here, I went to Calcutta barely fifty kilos.’
Then there were the jokes about the many side-benefits of having an absent-minded alcoholic for a father, and the equally conspicuous absence of jokes about their mother. (I should add that, to my eye, some of Jhappi’s own weight, as well as a fair portion of tonight’s good cheer, was definitely of liquid origin.)
‘I love the obsession you guys have in Bengal with finding a name for every relationship, Abhay Mama. One day I asked Ashim Mama because he has lived in Calcutta — look how Mamata Banerjee started off as Didi but is now everyone’s Ma. So does that mean in a few years Sourav Ganguly will go from being everyone’s Dada to Bengal’s father?
‘And Ashim Mama explained it all to me using “The Seven Ages of Man” as experienced on a Calcutta bus. How the conductors asking for your fare will show you where you are on the ladder of life simply by the nickname with which they address you, and how this moves from Bhai when you’re a kid, to Dada, then Kaku when they decide you could be their uncle, until one day you board a bus and have become the conductor’s grandpa, and women in turn graduate from Didi to sisters-in-law to grandmas.
‘And this system of classification is in fact critically important, which I know from personal experience, because depending on how you’re addressed — whether the conductor has yelled out a warning to the driver that an uncle or a grandpa or merely an older brother is about to get off — the extent to which he will slow down for you will vary. Isn’t that right, Ashim Mama? Only in the last stage of life does one earn the luxury of the bus actually stopping for you to get on or off.
‘I’m thinking that’s how my end will come, as a forty-five-year-old obese uncle of my height who is still called Bhai and is expected to jump off a running Calcutta bus. You know what, I should be an Uber ad!’
Dazzled as I was, I’m nowhere near talented enough to convey on the page the energy and impact of Jhappi’s presence. I did think to myself at one point how perfectly Didi and Praveen’s nickname fitted him: Jhappi, the walking hug. Perhaps that was someone he was aiming to be.
Before he left with Paakhi for the night, Jhappi told us Praveen was held up overnight at the furniture factory ten miles away, supervising a big order that was due for shipping on Saturday (‘Sweatshop conditions, Abhay Mama! Scandalous! If you were a journalist rather than a novelist, I would have taken you’), but that ‘maybe’ we would see him tomorrow. I said to please mention to Praveen that I only had a couple more evenings left on this visit.
To make the evening even more beautiful, Aaliya from across the street showed up at 7.30 (with uncanny timing to tuck into the sweets and salted cashew nuts on the tray: perhaps Moushumi had called her mother) and became another entranced member of Jhappi’s audience, moving between his lap and Dada’s, and occasionally over to the girls on the other side of the coffee table, who at one point at least were playing a game of shouting out instructions like stop, run, dance and sit, except the rule seemed to be that you had to remember to perform the opposite. I noted that particular one to share with Mira on Skype tomorrow, but for much of the evening, like everyone else, I couldn’t take my eyes off my nephew.
This is what I saw, Ma. This is what I saw, Lena. I know, I know, I couldn’t believe my own eyes. This is the world these guys have created for themselves — the ‘exiled’ half of the family; this is the atmosphere they generate and inhabit. This is the warmth and ease and openness with which they welcomed me. Halfway into my visit, Dada on his home turf had turned out to be $$$bold$$$nothing$$$$bold$$$$ like Dada in Wellington. I agree, I too wouldn’t have believed it second-hand. You’ll both just have to come here and see for yourselves.
I don’t think I have been more proud or delighted to belong to anything in my life. I don’t think that is hyperbole.
After Jhappi and Paakhi had left, I said to Dada and Moushumi that I fully expected to see my nephew on TV one day. If he continued to be as attentive to everything around him and kept adding thereby to his material, there was no limit to the performer he could be.
‘Dada, tell me he isn’t really depressed underneath.’
‘He isn’t really depressed underneath,’ Dada replied instantly, dead-pan.
So I couldn’t leave Hazaribagh at least reassured on that count. I decided against asking more just now about Jhappi’s drinking.
‘Of course I have no idea what his plans are after college, but if he wants to get into acting or even stand-up, I have a couple of director friends in Bombay and would be happy to arrange meetings for some career advice. He is the real deal, Dada. He has something I don’t think you can teach. We were all mesmerised watching him, no matter what he was talking about.’
Yes, yes, of course I wondered whether the almost non-stop performance wasn’t a concealment of other things, his anger, or indifference, towards me above all. And if he was always like this, then what more was he always concealing? Or if it was the case that he swung between this extreme of joviality and its opposite, then what was that like? What was it like for Paakhi, especially when her father was away?
But all those extremely pertinent, if unvoiced, doubts, did not displace what I had seen. It needn’t be an either/or. Jhappi was an incandescent performer.
I decided there would be plenty of time to learn more of the truth later.
‘Hey, Dada,’ I instead found myself asking, ‘would it be possible to meet your guy tomorrow?’
‘Who?’
I still had a chance to change the subject, but couldn’t decide if a clumsy retraction would draw more attention. Above all, I didn’t want to change the tenor of this beautiful day.
The trouble was, my brain had spoken on auto-pilot. It was a pre-planned move to say that, from before I arrived in Hazaribagh, with an idea of observing Dada’s reaction and whether it would lead to an actual meeting. But then the visit as it had unfolded couldn’t have revealed a world further removed from any sense of black magic or relentless malice, so this was a dreadful blunder. For fuck’s sake, Aaliya was still in the house. I had asked about a tantrik in a home in which Aaliya felt completely safe.
‘Nothing. It’s not important. I meant, you know, the man who gives you advice. I was just a bit curious, mostly as an author. Never met someone like that before, you see. But you know what, it can definitely wait for another visit. In fact, we should reserve tomorrow evening for Praveen and not plan anything else.’
Dada didn’t seem perturbed in the slightest. ‘You can also see him during the day.’
Oh, there popped another of my unnoticed assumptions. Because I had Maheshji in mind as a ‘practitioner of the dark arts’, I’d associated him solely with night.
‘Yes, but during the day you’ll have to queue like everyone else at his chamber.’
Dada’s smile gave away how much he was enjoying this, probably not just this moment in the conversation, but everything that he and the family and indeed their world in Hazaribagh had been surprising me with. ‘Yes, Abhi, exactly like a doctor’s chamber, except during the day he looks at horoscopes. The evening meetings you were thinking of take place by appointment at his home. But during the day, Maheshji is one of Hazaribagh’s most respected astrologers, and there’s a receptionist outside, just like at a doctor’s, and you get a number and wait your turn. If you haven’t made plans yet with Moushumi for the afternoon, you should definitely go. Yakub will be happy to drive you.’
He added as an afterthought, ‘I’ll try and see if I can make it too. Not to eavesdrop on you, don’t worry, but to ask about our Mira. You remember what I told you about her horoscope? Well, much of what I know is from this man, so if you’re interested in hearing more, we can get a printout of her time of birth and planetary positions and take it along for a consultation. I’m curious too, to see his reaction. Let me call him in the morning to find out how busy Thursdays are.’
And that was that was that, apparently. But what can you continue to suspect a man of when he invites you to meet his tantrik who’s going to tell you further amazing things about your daughter??
The Man Who Would Not See Page 23